The Warrior's Honor Quotes

“Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

“The problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination itself, but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home, you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be a master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

“Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

“By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

“No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

“An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.”
― Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience